As would be obvious to one of skill in the art, there are a number of situations and/or processes for which it would be desirable to extract a sample of a material from a vessel in which the material is contained. Such extraction would generally be desirable for purposes of examination or testing, but could be performed for other reasons, as well.
With respect to process monitoring, such sample extraction may be desirable in a number of processes, including without limitation, parallel synthesis (combinatorial chemistry) applications, organic synthesis, chemical process development, and the scale-up of laboratory processes into production. A number of other such applications wherein sample extraction would be of interest also exist and would be known to those of skill in the art.
Known sampling devices may be operated by hand, or may employ a vacuum-based device mounted remotely or in a vessel containing a material of interest, or a by-pass port or similar mechanism through which amount of a material of interest can be siphoned. In any case, however, known devices and methods generally require that an extracted sample be removed from the vessel and then transferred to another container before the sample can be quenched or similarly operated upon.
Known hand-operated devices commonly suffer from a lack of precision with regard to the timing of sample capture and subsequent sample manipulation and, obviously, are typically not amenable to process automation. Further, known hand-operated devices can only be operated to take samples that are at atmospheric pressure. Reactions that take place under pressure cannot be sampled with such hand operated devices. A by-pass type of sampling device, where the reaction flows through a loop to a point where it can be sampled, can be used to sample reactions under pressure—however, a large reaction volume is required to use such a device.
Known automated devices do not permit quenching, dilution, etc., to take place substantially contemporaneously with sample capture but, rather, require that a sample be first transferred to another vessel. Consequently, the state of a given sample may actually change from the time of sample extraction to the time of quenching, etc.
Therefore, based on these foregoing issues with known sampling devices, it should be apparent that an in situ sampling device capable of accurately and repeatably capturing a material sample of known volume and of quenching or otherwise processing a sample substantially contemporaneously with sample capture would be desirable. A sample capture device of the present invention is such a device.